IOE Community Dialogue Series

Founder and Manager Partner, She's Independent Investments

Natalie Levy is the Founder of She’s Independent, a women-first investment group offering an entirely new way to support women’s financial independence and influence through investing and board placements. As a member-led investment group, She’s Independent marries empowerment and action, with the ultimate mission of closing the power gap in investing by getting more women on the cap table, in the boardroom, and into positions of influence. Over the next 12 months, She’s Independent plans to deploy $1.5M of capital collectively, and has invested in 9 deals since its formation in January 2022.

An accomplished engineer turned Wall Street derivatives trader, investor, and advisor, Natalie has over a decade of tech operational experience, a portfolio of 30+ seed through later stage private investments and has experienced liquidity events across 3 of the first 4 investments in her growth technology portfolio with an average return >20X. She successfully negotiated compensation package increases at almost every employer she worked with and achieved 40+% YoY increases on behalf of herself and coaches others to achieve similar results

Natalie graduated magna cumme laude from University of Michigan with a BSE of Industrial Engineering and a minor in mathematics and resides in Boulder, CO with her loving rescue pup Beans and is passionate about gender equity and mental health awareness.

She's Independent is active on Instagram and LinkedIn so please feel free to tag us or share these social links.

She's Independent Investments makes investing work better, for more people.

Relationships is the most important word in the English lexicon. In the midst of code switching, imposter syndrome, and rampant sexism in colleges of engineering how can authentic relationships between historically excluded students, faculty, and staff be built? During this discussion we will consider best practices that we all must engage in since we are all responsible for building community.

The IOE Community Dialog Series is a series of facilitated discussions between members of the IOE community that surround a speaker and topic. The intent is to hear and engage with diverse viewpoints, ideas, and experiences to understand differing perspectives or challenges some of our colleagues or students face while acknowledging the explicit and hidden structures that influence our community; especially as it pertains to the work we do.

Biography

Damon P. Williams serves as the inaugural associate dean for inclusive excellence and chief diversity officer, advancing the College’s diversity and inclusion initiatives and supporting a climate of equity and belonging across our community. Williams is a member of the academic faculty in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), where he is a senior lecturer and director of ISyE’s Center for Academics, Success, and Equity, which he founded in 2020. He also speaks nationally on higher education and diversity in academia.

Williams earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2002 and then a master’s and Ph.D. in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan. He returned to Georgia Tech as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Teaching and Learning and a part-time lecturer in ISyE in 2010. He turned his attention to teaching and advising full-time in 2014.

Williams also earned a Master of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, and serves as senior pastor of Providence Missionary Baptist Church in southwest Atlanta.

What happens to our campus community this summer if the Supreme Court, in two cases against Harvard & UNC, bans the consideration of race in college admissions? How will the race based biases that we inherently carry impact our ability to build intercultural competence if the community has no diversity to challenge those biases? In this discussion on disrupting bias we will consider its impact on the quality of education large universities are able to provide.

Biography
Damon P. Williams serves as the inaugural associate dean for inclusive excellence and chief diversity officer, advancing the College’s diversity and inclusion initiatives and supporting a climate of equity and belonging across our community. Williams is a member of the academic faculty in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), where he is a senior lecturer and director of ISyE’s Center for Academics, Success, and Equity, which he founded in 2020. He also speaks nationally on higher education and diversity in academia.

Williams earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2002 and then a master’s and Ph.D. in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan. He returned to Georgia Tech as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Teaching and Learning and a part-time lecturer in ISyE in 2010. He turned his attention to teaching and advising full-time in 2014.

Williams also earned a Master of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, and serves as senior pastor of Providence Missionary Baptist Church in southwest Atlanta.

The IOE Community Dialog Series is a series of facilitated discussions between members of the IOE community that surround a speaker and topic. The intent is to hear and engage with diverse viewpoints, ideas, and experiences to understand differing perspectives or challenges some of our colleagues or students face while acknowledging the explicit and hidden structures that influence our community; especially as it pertains to the work we do.

Speaker Bio: 
Kayte Spector-Bagdady, JD, MBioethics is an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and interim Co-Director at the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine and at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is also the Chair of the U-M Research Ethics Committee, the ethicist on the Human Data and Biospecimen Release Committee, and a clinical ethicist. She teaches the Responsible Conduct of Research as well as Research Ethics and the Law and is an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Bioethics.

The overarching goal of Prof. Spector’s work is improving the governance of secondary research with health data and specimens to increase the accessibility of data and generalizability of advances across diverse communities. She is the PI of a National Human Genome Research Institute K01 studying how and why geneticists select datasets for their research and a National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences R01 on hospitals sharing patient data with commercial entities. Her recent articles have been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Science, JAMA, and Nature Medicine, and her research or expertise has appeared in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, and CNN.

Professor Spector was an Associate Director for President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, and is a former Board Member of the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities and practicing FDA law attorney. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and School of Medicine after attending Middlebury College.

This dialogue unites an academic researcher and an industry scientist to explore credit, debt, and finance. It covers academic theory, historical context, and practical industry insights. They investigate the impact and consequences of credit scores, emphasizing ethics, transparency, and fairness, and discuss the challenges within credit scoring models, offering a comprehensive understanding of this financial landscape.

How can we represent communities and the environment in optimization models? 
A dialogue about the question, not the answer.

How can an optimization model take into account the effect that a system has on people, communities, and the environment? In this community dialogue, Prof. Aaron Johnson will lead us in collaboratively thinking about the different ways that we, as engineers, can account for the effect that our technology has on people and the environment. The first part of the dialogue will involve a small-group activity around Johnson and colleagues' work on spaceport location planning. Then, we will talk about the social and environmental factors that engineers can--and cannot--include in engineering models. We will not come to a single conclusion, and Johnson does not have one answer to give to you. Instead, the importance of this dialogue lies in posing this question as a part of engineering work, starting to talk about it together, and then continuing to think about it as we go about our engineering work.

Bio: Aaron W. Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department and a Core Faculty member of the Engineering Education Research Program at the University of Michigan. His design-based research focuses on how to re-contextualize engineering science engineering courses to better reflect and prepare students for the reality of ill-defined, sociotechnical engineering practice. Johnson holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Michigan and a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to re-joining Michigan, he was an instructor in Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Outside of work, Johnson enjoys reading, collecting LEGO NASA sets, biking, camping, and playing disc golf.